Ambition Quotes - Page 5

• When you go in search of honey you must expect to be stung by bees.

  Joseph Joubert

  Inspirational, Business, Achievement

  "The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert". Book by Joseph Joubert, translated by Paul Auster, 2005.

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• Ambition is an expensive impulse, one that requires an enormous investment of emotional capital. Like any investment, it can pay off in countless different kinds of coin.

  Jeffrey Kluger

  Emotional, Different, Coins

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• The student's ambition should be to become a painter's painter, rather than a popular painter. The approbation of fellow artists based on sympathy and understanding is manifestly better than the fickle or fast homage of the greater public.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Artist, Understanding, Fickle

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• Ambition is vital, but dangerous: it is a keen motive and a driving force, but over what edge can it drive the artist?

  Eric Maisel

  Artist, Driving, Force

  Eric Maisel (1996). “Affirmations for Artists”, Tarcher

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• I got serious about painting at 12, when most people give up.

  Robert Bateman

  Giving Up, People, Serious

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• My ambition is to construct a painting so that the whole of its surface is alive, however I look at it. Each mark, and the interval between each mark must give something back on its own terms.

  Andrew Forge

  Giving, Alive, Looks

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• Full of hopes beyond their power though not beyond their ambition.

  Thucydides

  Thucydides, Victor Davis Hanson, Robert B. Strassler (2008). “The Landmark Thucydides”, p.178, Simon and Schuster

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• Ambition's debt is paid.

  William Shakespeare

  Debt, Paid

  'Julius Caesar' (1599) act 3, sc. 1, l. 83

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• A young man's ambition, can there be a more fleeting prospect?

  David Baldacci

  Men, Fleeting, Young

  "Stone Cold". Book by David Baldacci, 2007.

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• I had come to believe that I was not as clever as some other kids who were my friends. And yet I knew even then that I wanted to do something of an intellectual nature, and excel at it. I also realized that if I was going to succeed at all, it would be through hard work.

  Irving Sandler

  Clever, Believe, Hard Work

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• Ambition is frequently the only refuge which life has left to the denied or mortified affections. We chide at the grasping eye, the daring wing, the soul that seems to thirst for sovereignty only, and know not that the flight of this ambitious bird has been from a bosom or home that is filled with ashes.

  William Gilmore Simms

  Eye, Home, Wings

  William Gilmore Simms (1853). “Egeria: Or Voices of Thought and Counsel, for the Woods and Wayside”, p.74

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• Hard, withering toil only can achieve a name; and long days and months and years must be passed in the chase of that bubble, reputation, which, when once grasped, breaks in your eager clutch into a hundred lesser bubbles, that soar above you still.

  Donald Grant Mitchell

  Years, Names, Long

  Donald Grant Mitchell (1851). “Reveries of a Bachelor: Or A Book of the Heart”, p.127

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• It is observed by Cicero, that men of the greatest and most shining parts are most actuated by ambition.

  Joseph Addison

  Men, Shining

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• There is a kind of grandeur and respect which the meanest and most insignificant part of mankind endeavor to procure in the little circle of their friends and acquaintance. The poorest mechanic, nay, the man who lives upon common alms, gets him his set of admirers, and delights in that superiority which he enjoys over those who are in some respects beneath him. This ambition, which is natural to the soul of man, might, methinks, receive a very happy turn; and, if it were rightly directed, contribute as much to a person's advantage, as it generally does to his uneasiness and disquiet.

  Joseph Addison

  Men, Circles, Soul

  Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (1819). “The Spectator”, p.20

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• Don Quixote thought he could have made beautiful bird-cages and toothpicks if his brain had not been so full of ideas of chivalry. Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Beautiful, Ideas, People

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, J. D. McClatchy (2000). “Poems and Other Writings”, p.796, Library of America

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• Those that were up themselves, kept others low;
  Those that were low themselves, held others hard;
  He suffered them to ryse or greater grow;
  But every one did strive his fellow down to throw.

  Edmund Spenser

  Strive, Lows, Grows

  Edmund Spenser, George Gilfillan (1859). “The poetical works of Edmund Spenser: With memoir and critical dissertations”, p.16

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• No man is born without ambitious worldly desires.

  Thomas Carlyle

  Men, Desire, Ambitious

  Thomas Carlyle (1864). “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays ...”, p.236

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• I begin where most people end, with a full conviction of the emptiness of all sorts of ambition, and the unsatisfactory nature of all human pleasures.

  Alexander Pope

  People, Emptiness, Pleasure

  Alexander Pope (1853). “The poetical works of Alexander Pope”, p.73

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• We must distinguish between felicity and prosperity; for prosperity leads often to ambition, and ambition to disappointment; the course is then over, the wheel turns round but once, while the reaction of goodness and happiness is perpetual.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Disappointment, Wheels, Prosperity

  Walter Savage Landor (1876). “The Works and Life of Walter Savage Landor: Imaginary conversations. Third series : Conversations of literary men (First series)”

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• When ambitious men find an open passage, they are rather busy than dangerous; and if well watched in their proceedings, they will catch them selves in their own snare, and prepare a way for their own destruction.

  Francis Quarles

  Men, Self, Ambitious

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• Ambition becomes displeasing when it is once satiated; there is a reaction; and as our spirit, till our last sigh, is always aiming toward some object, it falls back on itself, having nothing else on which to rest; and having reached the summit, it longs to descend.

  Pierre Corneille

  Fall, Lasts, Spirit

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• Man was mark'd
  A friend in his creation to himself,
  And may, with fit ambition, conceive
  The greatest blessings, and the highest honors
  Appointed for him, if he can achieve them
  The right and noble way.

  Philip Massinger

  Men, Blessing, Honor

  Philip Massinger, John Ford (1859). “The Dramatic Works of Massinger and Ford”, p.356

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• There is a native baseness in the ambition which seeks beyond its desert, that never shows more conspicuously than when, no matter how, it temporarily gains its object.

  William Gilmore Simms

  Desert, Matter, Gains

  William Gilmore Simms (1853). “Egeria: Or Voices of Thought and Counsel, for the Woods and Wayside”, p.21

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• If you want to accomplish anything in life, you can't just sit back and hope it will happen. You've got to make it happen.

  Chuck Norris

  Motivational, Fitness, Hope

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• My only ambition was to create an honest picture that would interpret nature as she really is, as she ought to be seen.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Honest, Ought

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